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Building kitty from source

Build status

|kitty| is designed to run from source, for easy hackability. Make sure the following dependencies are installed first.

Dependencies

Run-time dependencies:

  • python >= 3.5
  • harfbuzz >= 1.5.0
  • zlib
  • libpng
  • freetype (not needed on macOS)
  • fontconfig (not needed on macOS)
  • ImageMagick (optional, needed to use the kitty icat tool to display images in the terminal)
  • pygments (optional, need for syntax highlighting in kitty +kitten diff)

Build-time dependencies:

  • gcc or clang
  • pkg-config
  • For building on Linux in addition to the above dependencies you might also need to install the -dev packages for: libdbus-1-dev, libxcursor-dev, libxrandr-dev, libxi-dev, libxinerama-dev, libgl1-mesa-dev, libxkbcommon-x11-dev, libfontconfig-dev and libpython-dev. if they are not already installed by your distro.

Install and run from source

git clone https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty && cd kitty

Now build the native code parts of |kitty| with the following command:

make

You can run |kitty|, as:

python3 .

If that works, you can create a script to launch |kitty|:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import runpy
runpy.run_path('/path/to/kitty/dir', run_name='__main__')

And place it in :file:`~/bin` or :file:`/usr/bin` so that you can run |kitty| using just kitty.

Building kitty.app on macOS from source

Install imagemagick, optipng and librsvg using brew or similar (needed for the logo generation step). And run:

make app

This :file:`kitty.app` unlike the released one does not include its own copy of python and the other dependencies. So if you ever un-install/upgrade those dependencies you might have to rebuild the app.

Note that the released :file:`kitty.dmg` includes all dependencies, unlike the :file:`kitty.app` built above and is built automatically by using the :file:`kitty` branch of build-calibre however, that is designed to run on Linux and is not for the faint of heart.

Note for Linux/macOS packagers

The released |kitty| source code is available as a `tarball`_ from the GitHub releases page.

While |kitty| does use python, it is not a traditional python package, so please do not install it in site-packages. Instead run:

python3 setup.py linux-package

This will install |kitty| into the directory :file:`linux-package`. You can run |kitty| with :file:`linux-package/bin/kitty`. All the files needed to run kitty will be in :file:`linux-package/lib/kitty`. The terminfo file will be installed into :file:`linux-package/share/terminfo`. Simply copy these files into :file:`/usr` to install |kitty|. In other words, :file:`linux-package` is the staging area into which |kitty| is installed. You can choose a different staging area, by passing the --prefix argument to :file:`setup.py`.

You should probably split |kitty| into two packages, :file:`kitty-terminfo` that installs the terminfo file and :file:`kitty` that installs the main program. This allows users to install the terminfo file on servers into which they ssh, without needing to install all of |kitty|.

Note

You need a couple of extra dependencies to build linux-package. :file:`tic` to compile terminfo files, usually found in the development package of :file:`ncurses`. Also, if you are building from a git checkout instead of the released source code tarball, you will need :file:`sphinx-build` from the Sphinx documentation generator.

This applies to creating packages for |kitty| for macOS package managers such as brew or MacPorts as well.